


The Sharpest Tool in the Shed

by Enervation_Prince



Category: Puss in Boots (2011), Shrek (Movies)
Genre: F/M, Gen
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-06-24
Updated: 2020-06-24
Packaged: 2021-03-03 20:00:16
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,740
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24891205
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Enervation_Prince/pseuds/Enervation_Prince
Summary: Nearly fifty years have passed since Shrek first braved the Dragon's Keep. Now a grandfather of six and far into his seventh decade, he enjoys a peaceful, contemplative retirement in his swamp with Fiona, no enemies having troubled him since his defeat of Rumpelstiltskin.His tranquil existence is interrupted, his true love and family frozen in their sleep, an unnamed foe demanding retribution for Shrek's crimes. Together with Donkey and Puss, he must embark on his last quest.
Relationships: Fiona/Shrek (Shrek)
Comments: 1
Kudos: 21





	The Sharpest Tool in the Shed

Shrek farted.

He brought his head back and allowed the lice living in his nose a view of the stars as he inhaled. It was only a test, but he was pleased with the resulting taste, the air sufficiently fecal.

A swarm of damselflies unfortunate enough to have been hovering close to the fumes perished and fell to the ground, in pairs. They did not whet his appetite. It was not for a lack of trying—roasted and served with salted algae, he knew, it was next to impossible to find wings with as satisfying a crunch—but the damselflies had been breeding at time of death.

The bodies as they were slayed all feelings of hunger.

They were close cousins of dragonflies, slimmer, with delicate wings that retracted while at rest—to this Shrek credited the superior taste—most variations dimorphic, the male corpses brighter and bluer, contrasting aggressively with both the dirt and those they had been copulating with.

When they were prepared to mate, the male damselfly would engage in protracted courtship rituals, the particularities of which would depend on the exact species: wings would be brandished and fluttered, abdomens raised, mock battles fought and won.

The female, pleased with the show, would make her selection. The new mates would find a suitable branch to work with and latch on to it and each other, forming with their bodies a wheel in the shape of a crude heart. They would remain a single indistinct entity until insemination or the intrusion of an ogre’s mortal winds - whichever came first.

It disgusted him. Shrek was used to being disgusting, to disgusting others—he savored, he frequently thought, the screams of the men who came to drive him off when they encountered him for the first time, not as a tale in a warm tavern but as a monster in the cold darkness of bog, his girth, his odor—but in all his thirty years only the damselfly hearts had ever turned revulsion, his oldest friend, his only friend, against him.

His conclusion held the attachment responsible for the betrayal. Other organisms in the swamp, largely, bred through physical connection, but none by the same means as the damselfly. Fish did not require any connection - birds and mammals did but they did not cease to be themselves. They never surrendered an identity as a whole to become only a subdivision of an inferior, giving more, becoming less.

Shrek grumbled at the realization that the damselflies had been treading air when they passed. Previous observation had led him to incorrectly conclude that they could only form the heart while grounded - either he was wrong or they had adapted.

He heard the mob still coming for him, far but not removed from earshot, a single pitchfork weakly reflecting the flame from their torches. He had lured them to a densely thicketed area south of his home, his playground for such occasions.

This mob was smarter than most others, if not all others he had encountered. There were twelve men at Shrek’s last count, and for men they were large. Most resembled former soldiers or mercenaries. They were the quietest group he could remember giving chase to him, with stances suggesting control over fear, an understanding of stealth. They wore armor.

Exempting the man with the pitchfork, they all had crossbows. He loved that. He could have counted on one hand the parties with even a single member possessing the good sense to bring a ranged weapon at all. If he had been them, with what he knew, a crossbow would have been his first choice of ordinary weapon.

The man with the pitchfork—who Shrek thought the title of lad more deserving, already scrawny and scrawnier still in the company of muscular comparisons—led the group, an unhealthy gap separating him from his fellows.

Shrek saw the game; the lad was a sacrifice. Shrek would finish him with one strike, but it would give the others enough time to aim and fire. It was as good of a plan as they could be expected to devise. At the expected distance, eleven arrows would end him.

He pondered how they had convinced the lad to play his part. They probably had not framed it as was, that if it occurred in the manner they imagined and hoped it would, he and he alone would be awarded with the horrible, brutish deaths ogres were said to grant: to be crushed, strangled, disemboweled, flayed, swallowed whole…

Providence declared the lad would live. While stories from the taverns always spoke of the ogre’s unspeakable cruelty, Shrek imagined they rarely broached the topic of ogre visual acuity. With the fire they carried above them, the humans could see a precious few steps in front of them. They were not aware that Shrek was immune, that darkness only hindered his enemies.

Shrek laughed and dropped his trousers as they approached, cheeks of lush green chub breathing in the same fresh air they were predestined to recontaminate. He turned away from the men and squatted, the entrance to the cavern on full display in the darkness, offering the mob an invitation to infinite redolence, an introduction to the artisanship involved in the creation of fine, true vapors, a hole from which shades of green gradually bled into blackness the deeper was ventured, from which it would be delivered, upwards and outwards, bursting invisibly, boisterously into the air, accompanied by the sounds of furious and invincible brass, resonation, reverberation, resolution.

Again, Shrek farted.

The men, who at the moment of detonation were but steps away from having been able to make out the edges of his inner swamp, came to a halt as the blast of air assaulted them. Crossbows and torches were dropped as the men tore the helmets from their faces, desperate for unsullied air as they were, no longer able to come to reason. They scattered in retreat, the plan of attack forgotten, distant choked wheezes sounding out Shrek’s masterful victory.

He pulled his trousers back up and rewarded his cheeks with a paternalistic clap. He stretched his arms as he walked to where his strike had landed, kicking a forsaken helmet.

He saw the pitchfork the lad had been carrying. He smiled, picked it up, and used it to scratch his ass.

“Better out than in, I always say.”

* * *

A much younger Shrek, scavenging the ruins of an abandoned village, discovered the former home of a sorcerer. Almost everything of value had been stolen or vandalized years ahead of his arrival, but he found a small collection of dusty books beneath an overturned cauldron, seven in total, all of which he claimed and took back to his swamp for further study.

There, with the proper time to take a deeper look into what he had scrounged, he rejoiced. Six of the seven were tomes directly discussing the instruction of magic, more valuable than anything he had ever pillaged.

Shrek had not witnessed magic in his life, had only heard whispers from travelers who did not know he was lurking in the scenery near the footpaths, an occasional mention in a book. His sources were always secondary, those who could only say what and never how. If they were reliable, magic could summon elements, reshape flesh, give life to the lifeless…

Never would there have been a swamp as secure as his, with that power available to him.

His dream was unrealizable. Magic was more difficult than passersby knew; the knowledge contained in the tomes was unusable as far as Shrek was concerned, impossible to interpret without an experienced teacher. Only the short prefatory chapters preceding the spells were clear enough to impart Shrek with any information, and none of it pleased him: the inherent dangers magic presented to the untrained, the necessity of formal instruction, the intrinsic, genetic nature of sorcery, which manifested itself rarely, only a select few in each generation capable of practicing the art…

The seventh book was about ogres, written by a hunter. The man had killed and dissected two of Shrek’s race, one an infant, before being slain by an attempted third, his sons having strung his notes together for publication following his demise.

Learning about his own body had been a magic all its own.

Shrek’s failed foray into wizardry was a buried memory by the time of his encounter with the crossbow mob, but the exploration of his own physiology was a continuing adventure still, the hunter’s text having sparked a lasting interest.

The book had taught him about his stomachs. He had four. This information, together with two years of intense training, allowed him to develop his most potent weapon.

The Winds.

Shrek’s Wind Solo was what had brought down the damselflies. It was the first success in his efforts to elevate flatulence, and an indispensable tool. An ordinary ass eructation involved the release of gasses trapped in the lower colon, but Wind Solo engaged the last of his four stomachs as well. To achieve the desired effect, Shrek, who had laboriously trained himself to contract and relax the individual muscles of his digestive system until they had the dexterity of a fourth arm, would send gas rocketing from the fourth stomach to the end of his rectum, back and forth as pressure built, the release with a stink cosmically more powerful than a mere ogre’s toot.

Wind Solo took about ten seconds for Shrek to prepare, and he could begin a reload as soon the first blast had exited him. It killed bugs and fish, stunned small animals, and disoriented men.

The crossbow mob had been more than disoriented; they had experienced Wind Duo. Duo allowed the pumped gas to travel above Shrek’s fourth stomach and into the third before returning down. The stench produced was not dramatically more unpleasing than Wind Solo, but the delivery was more striking. A literal burst of air would explode from his behind with enough force to shred through his trousers and sway treetops. It wasn’t enough force to knock anyone off their feet, but it did convey the full brunt of the miasma instantly, which lingered for days on skin it made contact with.

Wind Duo was Shrek’s crowd control. It took five minutes to carry to term, and he had to wait as long to start charging another if he didn't want to hurt himself.

Shrek had only performed Wind Trio once, experimentally, tested on a wild stallion at short range. With his second stomach in play, it took him nearly an hour to reach maximum pressure.

The horse died. Shrek shat blood for a week, temporarily lost most feeling in his buttocks, and for the next year found that he no longer needed to exert himself when passing stool, which fell out of him with the same enthusiasm as a pebble bouncing down the sides of a large well.

Wind Quartet was a purely hypothetical method of suicide.

With his assailants on the retreat, Shrek returned to his swamp, dropping the pitchfork into a pile of other, similar weapons aside his outhouse. He enjoyed his collection of souvenirs, which occasionally surrendered their function as keepsakes to unclog his latrine.

He entered his outhouse and for the second time that evening, dropped his trousers.

* * *

A half-century later while exiting the same outhouse, Shrek heard a snap under his feet. It was an hour before dawn, and he hadn’t seen the pitchfork while coming out. It had been raining all throughout the night - the wet mud must have dislodged and carried his memorial decloggers from their place, the unlucky pitchfork positioned perfectly for him to crush in the darkness of early morning.

The darkness was a poor excuse, he acknowledged, him possessing the eyes of an ogre, but he had yet to truly wake up, and beyond that, he was growing older. Seventy-eight. The average ogre would outlive the average man by multiple decades, and Shrek was not close enough to the end for the awareness of his own mortality to strangle him, but his was certainly past his physical peak. He was wiser, far wiser than he had been in his younger days, but this was tempered with a slowness that he was always frustrated to recognize. It occasionally took him more time than he was comfortable with for him to turn a feeling into a concrete thought, and details sometimes escaped him, much to his embarrassment.

Fergus had brought his two children with him on his most recent weekly visit, and there had been an uncomfortable pause when Shrek first tried to greet the younger of the two, his name not coming to him. It made him seem worse than he was—so many details he could recall perfectly from prior visits and letters, the boy’s age, seventeen, his hobbies, the guitar, raising geese, his favorite food, fermented skunk cheese—but his inability to recall the name, the most basic information possible, implied to the others that he remembered nothing else of his youngest grandchild. It was cruel that the simplest details seemed to disappear the most, and only when he needed them.

“Shrek,” his grandson had said, once enough time had passed.

Shrek had smiled, trying to defuse the tension with a small laugh. “You would call your own grandfather by his first name? What’s Old Fergie teaching you?”

His grandson didn’t smile back. His face carried pity, not resentment. He was a timid young man, he could be tempted into opening up with enough friendly conversation, but he was not skilled at talking.

“Dad,” said Fergus, clearing his throat. “He’s Shrek.”

Shrek Junior. How had that escaped him? He had wept when Fergus had first told him that he would be naming his firstborn after him. It had been one of the happiest moments of his life.

He spent the remainder of the evening overcompensating for the error, finding ways to unnaturally insert the many details of Junior’s life he did remember into the conversation. Fergus and Junior downplayed the mistake for his benefit, but Shrek later heard his son speaking with Fiona in the hallway as they were preparing to go. If her mind had slowed any with age, it had done so imperceptibly. She was as cogent as she had ever been.

“He’s there,” she said, speaking not in reference to any physical presence, unaware that he was listening from the next room. “It happens, the little slips in his memory, the tiny mistakes, but he’s there. You can see that. Don’t tell me you can’t.”

“I can,” he said. “I didn’t say now, Mom. But it could continue. It could progress.”

“It’s going to continue,” said Fiona. “It started years ago, and it will continue. But it’s slow. He’s there, and he’ll be there for years yet.”

“We have room,” said Fergus. “Plenty of it, in the castle. We’d love having you both. The children would, too.”

Fiona laughed. “Your father, leaving the swamp? No. I love Far Far Away as much as I do our hovel, but your father has only one home. It wouldn’t be as you imagine. It would be much worse for him. If there is any chance of him declining further while here, it will be guaranteed once you move him.”

Shrek declined further analysis of the memory, running his hand over his face. He picked up the broken pitchfork and looked at it.

It had broken uncleanly, splintering off into two pieces. He remembered the day he had obtained it, the mob with the armor. Happier memories of a time when he had been naive and lonely and terrified. He would have been thirty, only weeks before he met Donkey, the fairytale creatures, Fiona.

Damselflies, now, Shrek could only identify as beautiful. If his mind eventually faded to nothing he knew he would hold on to that. The attitudes he had held in his youth were alien. Love was precious. Fiona, his children, his friends, the only reason for living, not a trace of doubt in his mind about that. Those connections. Those precious, precious connections.

Shrek yawned. He was still tired. The sun still slept, and he decided he would rejoin it. He smiled and made the journey back to his home, into his bed, nestling his arms against his partner, his head against her soft shoulder, and the realization came that she was not breathing.


End file.
